


ghosts

by inverse



Series: an accumulation of inevitabilities [5]
Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-05
Updated: 2014-05-05
Packaged: 2018-01-22 00:50:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1569881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inverse/pseuds/inverse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>3 a.m. walk, 3 a.m. talk.</p>
            </blockquote>





	ghosts

It was dead in the middle of the night and Aomine was crossing the road that was outside of his house. He’d gotten back from the airport a few hours ago after his physical for the Miami Heat and they said they’d let his agent know as soon as possible if things turned out okay. His parents were fast asleep and the combination of jetlag and nerves from flying had rendered his brain completely fried and as a result he was weirdly edgy and not at all tired. He decided to take a walk to expend all that nervous energy; sleep could wait. He didn’t have anything to do for the next few days except to wait for news, anyway.

His neighbourhood was as sleepy as usual. Thank god for convenience stores. There was one a short walk away, beckoning him like a radiant, air-conditioned oasis in the middle of a pitch-dark desert. A few stragglers were standing right outside its entrance, smoking away like chimneys, their silhouettes outlined with neon light, faces in the shadows.

Aomine traversed through the rows of egg sandwiches lying snug in plastic clingwrap and canned drinks sitting in their ice-cold prisons. He didn’t know if it was because of the overly sterile environment and the headache-inducing amount of white that covered the walls and the tiles and stung his already oversensitive eyes, or the post-flight adrenaline and the fact that all he’d eaten in twelve hours was shitty airplane food, but suddenly he felt like if he spent a minute more in the store he’d retch all over the pristine floor. He grabbed a chicken karaage bento and a can of milk coffee off a refrigerated shelf, then headed to the counter to make payment.

“Heat it up?” the cashier asked, scanning the barcode on the items. Her chocolate brown hair was tied up in a ponytail. She looked like she was fresh out of high school. Aomine wondered what she was doing, part-timing at a convenience store in the middle of the night.

“Yeah, sure.”

He left the exact amount of change in the till and watched as she put his food in the microwave. His eyes strayed involuntarily to her perky, uniform-clad breasts, which he estimated were a solid 36C. He’d gotten very good at this over the years.

Plastic bag of hot food now in hand, he exited the place, but right as the sliding doors chimed him out he bumped into one of the smokers outside. “Hey,” he growled, slightly annoyed, “don’t go standing right where people are walking in and out,” but the offender just turned to look up at him from shoulder height, giving him an utterly unpretentious, actually unapologetic “Sorry”, his eyes uncannily large and devoid of expression. Aomine squinted in the dark – his stranger’s face was partially shrouded because his own shadow was looming overhead – then managed to splutter out, “Tetsu? That you?”

 

*

 

As far as he knew, Kuroko lived right on the opposite side of town. Apparently he was out to “hunt down his inspiration” in the wee hours of the morning. “You can’t just wait for inspiration come to you, you’ve got to chase it down,” he said unflinchingly as they strolled to a nearby plaza, which Aomine didn’t know whether to take seriously because it was fucking loopy, but Kuroko had said it with such a straight face, which was the case for a lot of the things that he said (see also, “Would you believe me if I said I was actually on my way to look for you?”). A backstory – Kuroko was studying modern literature in university, and while being a teacher when he graduated was the best bet, he wanted to write his own stories on the side. He was working on something, which was why he was out “hunting for inspiration”; he’d taken a midnight train to the end of the line and when staring out the glassy windows into fast-moving buildings wasn’t enough he started walking from the station, and ended up having a smoke outside the convenience store for a break. They met only occasionally these days and even those had been petering out lately. A lot of it had started out as basketball meetups with Kagami and Kise where Kuroko proved more and more inept, sometimes comically so as he struggled to match their natural athleticism with his body, which was quickly getting creaky after his teenage years, and then those became weekend meals as people got busier, and even then those only happened about once every two to three months nowadays.

Kuroko still smelt like smoke when they settled on a bench near the entrance of the plaza, even though Aomine thought that the cold morning breeze might take some of it away. These were heavy ones; he recognised the smell, heady and pungent, mingling with the earthy, grassy, almost-too-fresh scent of the trees around them, like the ones his father used to smoke before the doctor started advising him on his cholesterol levels. For someone as nondescript as Kuroko was, he really had a taste for the peculiar.

“You haven’t told me why you’re out at this hour, Aomine-kun,” he said, watching as Aomine tore into his food.

“Me?” replied Aomine, stalling for time as hot, greasy carbs hit his taste buds and sent all the blood rushing southward into his stomach, away from his brain. He wanted to savour this; Kuroko could afford to wait a few more seconds. “Just got back from my flight. I told you, right? Went to get my checkup done, on their request.” He took time to chew, then swallowed. “I don’t know if I’m thinking right. It doesn’t seem real. If they sign me I’m not gonna be home for years. Plus I’m going to have to learn English. Me, Tetsu, speaking English all the time. Can you imagine that?”

“I think that should be the least of your concerns. Isn’t that good? Moving,” Kuroko asked, regarding him with a questioning look. “You’ve been wanting a change of environment for a while now.”

That was true. Playing in the Japanese league just wasn’t the same, even though he’d only been there for less than half a year; a lot of it was the same circle of people whom he used to play high school basketball with – not to mention the petty animosity a lot of them seemed to still have towards him, stemming from grudges formed years ago – and the shine quickly wore off as he looked for worthy opponents both inside and outside of his team to no avail. There were perhaps one or two excellent players. What the veterans had in experience they lacked in raw skill and ability. He wanted bigger fish, and if you wanted bigger fish you were going to have to give some things up.

“Yeah,” he agreed finally. “You’re right.”

“You’re just going to have to adapt,” Kuroko said. His faint smile was barely visible under the few weak streetlamps that covered the entirety of the plaza’s vicinity, but Aomine gave him the benefit of the doubt. As he finished up his food he realised that, sitting so close together, Kuroko seemed to have shrunk a little since the last time they met, which was a couple of months ago, looking a little gaunt in his ensemble – plain white tee, dark-washed jeans. He wanted to reach out and give Kuroko a solid pat on the shoulder, just to check that he was really sitting there and wasn’t just some figment of Aomine’s imagination that had materialised into existence in the dark, but doing that for no rhyme or reason would just be really weird. He’d be the loopy one then. Maybe it was because he himself had gotten a bit thicker from all the workouts and training. Or maybe it was those nasty cigarettes Kuroko was smoking, those made you drop all your pounds, and Kuroko was already pretty skinny to begin with.

 

*

 

He finished his food while they talked about how Kuroko’s father’s high blood pressure had gotten worse lately (“He can come exercise with my old man,” Aomine commented), but somehow he was still hungry. Not one bit satiated. He should have bought more food. He tried to think of more common conversation fillers but the only thing that came to mind with a horrifying persistence was Momoi, with whom Kuroko had a tearful altercation a while ago about how he never really cared one bit about how she felt for him, but left her hanging anyway. So that was probably a bad idea. He shoved all the trash back into the plastic carrier, got up, and tossed it into a nearby trashcan, then looked back, about to ask Kuroko if he wanted a drink, but Kuroko wasn’t there anymore.

Aomine squinted. “Tetsu? You there?”

“Yes?”

Kuroko was standing behind him. Aomine started a little. “Goddammit, Tetsu. Not again.”

“I was following you. I can’t be blamed for your lack of alertness, Aomine-kun.”

“Want a drink?” Aomine asked. “There should be a vending machine around here.”

There was indeed. It was sitting obediently at the intersection of two paths right around the corner, humming silently to itself with electrical buzz. One of the tubes lining its ceilings had gone out, giving it a sad, one-eyed, yet determined feel. A survivor of a vending machine. Aomine inspected its wares through its glass display. “Pocari?” he asked. “Just like old times.” Kuroko nodded, and Aomine slotted two 100 yen coins into the machine, made his selection, and gave the machine a well-aimed kick to the side so the drinks would come tumbling down faster. It was taking very, very long.

“That’s not very nice,” Kuroko observed as Aomine collected the drinks from the dispenser. There were crickets chirping among the bushes, annoyingly loud, as if seconding Kuroko’s remark.

“Machines don’t have feelings, who gives a damn if it’s got a dent in the side. What matters is the drinks gotta come out fast, I don’t have all day.”

Kuroko had managed to light up another of his cigarettes in the meantime. Aomine stared as he alternated between puffing and chugging down his Pocari, then asked, sceptical, “Doesn’t that taste bad? Doing both of that together.” To which Kuroko replied, straight-faced, “Not at all. In fact it tastes a bit like sea urchin. A bit salty, a bit sweet, very pleasantly savoury. Would you like to try?”

Aomine gave his preposterous idea a pass. “You know, you don’t seem to have smoked this much in the past. Is it a thing among arts students? Like, it’s cool at your school or something.”

“It just helps to clear my mind. Especially when I’m thinking about writing a lot. Something about it just helps to separate all those threads, tangled together.”

“Come to think of it, you haven’t told me what you’re writing. Every time I ask, you’re working on something.”

Kuroko leaned against the vending machine’s surface, his face glowing white and luminescent, skin seemingly possessing a transparent quality under the fluorescent light. He seemed to give Aomine’s statement some serious consideration before answering. “Have I never mentioned this before?” He paused to collect his thoughts, then continued. “This is going to be embarrassing to admit, but I was going to write something very autobiographical in nature. A lot of it is going to be made up, of course, but I spoke to a mentor of mine and she suggested that I try to, for starters, write something based on material that I was familiar with. I wanted to,” he said, looking down at his shoes and sucking in another breath from his cigarette, and Aomine felt like he was almost trying to make sure that Aomine wasn’t really paying attention or lucid enough to remember this in the morning, “write about invisibility. I want to write about being invisible all the time and what it feels like to be feel visible. I took a very long late-night walk a while ago for the very first time and I’ve done it several times since then. Somehow, when there is no one around to not-notice me, I feel more visible than ever. Maybe it’s because I don’t fade into a crowd, or maybe it’s because I don’t have to apologise for someone getting startled when they see me appearing out of nowhere. I just am. It is a very interesting sensation.”

Aomine didn’t really get what Kuroko was getting at, but he just frowned and drank the rest of his Pocari slowly, waiting for Kuroko to continue.

“You were going to be part of it, Aomine-kun. Please do not be offended by what I am going to say next. The character was supposed to an antagonist who doesn’t know what it’s like to be invisible, as a sort of contrast. I was also thinking, maybe he could be an amalgamation –”

“Amalga-what –”

“– of some of my friends. Maybe the whole story will have only two characters. It’s my first attempt at trying to write something proper, anyway, so I shouldn’t try to bite off too much. When I said that I was out looking for you, it wasn’t actually really a joke; I was thinking of you when I somehow wandered into your neighbourhood. I just didn’t expect to run into you. That was completely accidental.” Kuroko stopped again, as if he’d said too much. “What do you think?”

“Sounds okay. Whatever, you know I’m not good at this fancy storytelling business. You just gotta give me royalties if you’re gonna use me in your novel, you punk.” There was an instantaneous, pulsing flash running across Aomine’s temples now, like a stream of hot water flowing from one side of his head to another, as if signalling the oncoming of a terrible headache or a migraine. Twenty-three hours without sleep and counting. He gave the bridge of his nose an especially hard pinch and shook his head a little, trying to ward away the oncoming drowsiness. An odd thought came to his mind; he rambled as he tried to express it as coherently as he could. “Hey, Tetsu. You know, if I were gonna do something like that – write a book – what d’you think it’d be about? Basketball? Or maybe it won’t all be about basketball. You said autobiographical. Maybe I’ll just write an autobiography then. What’ll make a bestseller?” “Struggles. The more tragic the better. And the eventual triumph.” “If anything, I have too many triumphs, Tetsu.” He paused, trying to think it through after the initial knee-jerk display of internalised conceit (and after catching the look on Kuroko’s face, which suggested that he would punch the lights out of Aomine if he could). “Maybe that’s my struggle. I haven’t stopped thinking about it for a long time, you know. It wasn’t a good feeling. I – you know what I’m talking about.” “I do.” “I keep wondering, what if things don’t change even after I move away? It’s probably impossible, I know. You’re talking about the best players the world has to offer. I’ll be on my damned toes all the time. Sound stupid, huh? Worrying.”

Kuroko looked at him as if it was a foregone conclusion, and even through Aomine’s hazy vision, blurred by fatigue, his expression was clear.

“That’s what ghosts do, Aomine-kun,” he said. “They haunt.”


End file.
